Fall for Dance Festival Progam 5
“Le Spectre de la Rose,” “Snow,” “The Dying Swan,” “Revelations”
City Center
New York, NY
October 2, 2009
By Kathleen O’Connell
Copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Fall for Dance capped off its celebration of The Ballets Russes’ centennial year with two short ballets by Michel Fokine: “Le Spectre de la Rose,” choreographed for Diaghilev’s company in 1911, and a pre-Ballets Russes work, “The Dying Swan,” choreographed for Anna Pavlova in 1905. The other two works on the program—Sang Jijia’s 2008 solo “Snow” and Alvin Ailey’s beloved 1960 repertory staple “Revelations”—didn’t have anything to do with The Ballets Russes, but that’s okay: Fall for Dance is a smorgasbord, not a seminar. A common thread bound the program together nonetheless. One of dance’s glories is its ability to probe an individual heart and lay its operations bare with economy and directness. However disparate the works may have seemed, each sought to mine that rich vein, whether its subject was a debutante swept up into the first thrill of romance or a sinner hungering for the balm of divine love.
Despite its Ballets Russes connection, “Le Spectre de la Rose” isn’t a programming no-brainer like “Revelations.” In some ways it was a bolder choice for an endeavor like Fall for Dance than something recognizably avant-garde. It’s got pyrotechnic red meat to throw at a house primed to tear into it with enthusiasm, but it otherwise defies nearly every expectation a newbie might have about ballet without telegraphing that it’s going to do so. It looks traditional enough—no bare stage, legs, or angst—and the music is redolent of a bygone era; there’s even a little storyline. But the ballerina isn’t an enchanted princess doing fouettés in a tutu: she’s an unremarkable ingénue whose entire back story consists of having worn a rose to a ball. Nor is the danseur her gallant prince: he’s the embodiment of a rose’s perfume, for heaven’s sake. That’s not the gender assignment likely to spring to a modern audience’s mind. And devoted thought the rose might be to the happiness of his debutante, the two are hardly a couple; if he’s a projection of her desire, her parents can sleep easy for a little while longer. It’s weird, but not in-your-face weird; Bakst’s scenery and costume designs don’t even look like iconic kinky Bakst. There’s the risk that the audience might simply shrug in bafflement.
There was no need for concern. The audience didn’t come to sit on its hands: Gina Bresciani and Tzu-Chao Chou’s fresh and tender performance received a well-deserved round of applause. Bresciani danced with a buoyant winsomeness that was never sickly-sweet, and managed to look like a charming jeune fille despite Bakst’s Biedermeier horror of a nightcap. Chou’s pliant, pulsing arms were exotic without being creepy and he delivered his solo leaps and turns with an affecting, unmannered directness, if not the last nth of technical polish. Chou does have a huge extension: before his departing bound out of the window he unfurled a 12 o’clock developpé that provoked an audible gasp from the audience.
Sang Jijia, a protégé of William Forsythe, is a subtle, supple dancer with a compelling stage presence. Per the program notes, he intended “Snow” be the enactment of an “intimate journey” undertaken by both performer and audience. His premise—that the mind can speak when the world is made silent by snowfall—is rich with theatrical possibilities that weren’t fully realized. “Snow” didn’t go where I expected it to; where it went was on too long.
The stage picture was hypnotically beautiful: the curtain rose to snow falling against a black backdrop onto a softly lit, bare stage. Sang, dressed in black, stood near the wings, his upturned face gazing into the snow. Walking slowly upstage, he eased into series of sweeping arm gestures, pliant lunges, and swiveling turns that culminated in a slow tumble to the floor. He rolled to his feet and repeated the sequence again. And again. And yet again. His movements quickly grew more violent and disordered: with each repetition he flailed against himself, against space, against the snow-covered stage. Then, just moments before the end, he regained to his initial composure and headed back toward the wings as the curtain fell.
A theatrical journey needs a legible emotional arc to be effective; otherwise, it’s just noodling. Sang hit peak distress moments into the work and was stuck there until he simply stopped flailing and walked off into the snowfall. Why he went where he did and how he got back again remained unexamined, or at least undemonstrated. The music, minimalism in prolific Belgian composer Wim Mertens’ easy-listening mode, didn’t provide any context: it was as pretty and uneventful as the snowfall.
The second half of the program opened with Diana Vishneva’s performance of “The Dying Swan.” There’s no point in denying it: the minute the cello began its solo the fabulous Mme. Ida Nevasayneva of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo flapped into my mind’s eye. I smiled, which is surely not what Fokine had in mind. In any event, despite a couple of perhaps too realistic final shudders, Vishneva didn’t look as if she wanted to embody a noble creature in its death throes so much as a capital–B Ballerina in the grand style. She chose to remain in character when she acknowledged the musicians and took her bow and the house went nuts. If only someone had contrived to throw a bouquet or two from the balcony, the vignette would have been complete.
If “Revelations” can’t coax newcomers to make a return trip to the theater, nothing can. The Alvin Ailey company’s accomplished dancers threw themselves into the work with a will and the audience ate it up with gratitude. There are any number of moments in “Revelations” that could degenerate into mere displays of technical prowess—the perilous balances in “Fix Me, Jesus” or the plunging turns of “Sinner Man”—but the cast took care to make them expressive, not just astonishing. Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims’ performance of “Fix Me, Jesus” was especially moving, as was Amos J Machanic’s of “I Wanna Be Ready.” (I was surprised by a point of connection between “Fix Me, Jesus” and little “Spectre”: in both, a man supports a woman out of tender care rather than passion.) Hope Boykin danced everything like she believed it; even when the choreography told me to look elsewhere, my heart told me to look at her.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
